Ron Paul Supports Vitter Amendment That Is Endorsed By About 80% Of American Citizens

It doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that the measure to audit the Federal Reserve is coming under continuous fire from the central bank and its cronies. For the first time since the Federal Reserve was created nearly a century ago, they have hired an actual lobbyist to pound the pavement on Capitol Hill. This is a desperate effort to hang on to the privilege of secrecy and lack of accountability they have enjoyed for so long. Last week showed they are getting their money’s worth in the Senate.

At the very last minute on the floor of the Senate, supposed compromise language was agreed to and substituted in the Sanders Amendment to the Financial Reform Bill. This language was acceptable to the administration, committee leadership, and to the Fed. The trouble is, while it is better than no audit at all, it guts the spirit of a truly meaningful audit of the most crucial transactions of the Fed. In fact, rather than still calling the Sanders Amendment an audit, maybe it should instead be called more of a disclosure at this point.

The new language of the Sanders Amendment requires a one-time disclosure from the Fed of 13(3) facilities, foreign currency swaps and mortgage-backed securities. Basically, their sins of the past would be revealed and Americans would know more about who got bailed out by the Fed and under what terms. This would be good, but its not nearly enough.

Taxpayers are sick and tired of bailing out privileged, dysfunctional institutions that should be allowed to fail in order to stop their ability to wreak havoc on our economy. Perpetuating these corporations at taxpayer expense is not just wasteful, it is actively harmful. It would be good to know what went on in the past, but what about accountability in the future? A one-time disclosure now will not do us a lot of good down the road when the cycle repeats itself and friends of the Fed find themselves in trouble again.

More importantly, agreements with foreign central banks are not touched by the new Sanders Amendment language. At a time when Greece, Portugal, Spain and other countries are experiencing dire financial crises and have their hands out to the international community, we need to know if our Federal Reserve is at all involved in bailing them out. As weary as we are of bailing out companies, the American people would not stand for bailing out entire countries. Our government is wasteful enough in its own affairs without contributing to the waste of other countries. Yet the Fed currently has the tools it needs to do just this, and to do it in secret.

If we cannot take away the Fed’s ability to waste trillions of taxpayer dollars on failing companies and failing countries, at the very least, we can take away their ability to do this with no transparency or accountability to the American people. While the Sanders Amendment no longer contains a full audit, Senator David Vitter has introduced an amendment which contains the Audit the Fed language that passed the House last fall. The Senate must pass the Vitter amendment for full disclosure and full accountability going forward.

Vitter is one of my senators. I have been e-mailing and calling him religiously. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but you don't know unless you try. I urge everyone to contact their senators and reps.

The more I learn about the unaccountable, corrupt, manipulative, and literally sociopathic nature of the Federal Reserve, the more my mind reels from the sheer magnitude of the pernicious parasitical elitism and absolute evil inherent in its very existence.

Taken over the 97 years of its existence, I sincerely believe that there is no criminal enterprise in our nation's history that can even remotely compare to this rapacious tapeworm that continues to drain more and more of the economic lifeblood from the American economy. And to add insult to injury, most of the increasingly anemic hosts of this monstrosity have been brainwashed into believing that its presence is necessary for their very survival, when the truth is precisely the opposite.

This is how congress works. Legislation that is lobbyed against by the elite but supported by the people needs to be watered down. Compromise the original objective. Replace any effective measures then pass it as a success. Citizens rarely follow the process.

You really mean that the USA has been thieving from the rest of the world for decades, via the status of the US dollar as the world's de facto reserve currency. Agreed, but two wrongs still do not make a right.

Leo, I am generally happy to give you lots of poetic license but this stuff about others "bailing out" the US is pure bullshit. I would love to have back the trillions of dollars we wasted on keeping our troops in Europe, for example, unwrapping candy wrappers while giving the Europeans a free ride on their own military expenditures. The same goes for the Japanese. Do you think the price of oil is where it is and all those corrupt Middle Eastern sheikdoms are safe because they are protected by the Greek air force? Nothing would please me more than to pull out all of the US troops from the Continent and see just how good all of those wonderful European economies look then.

The only reason the US is in the Middle East is because it wants to control oil supplies. As for bailing out the US, ask the Chinese how they feel like after funding your massive trade deficit. Admittedly, they're doing it to support theri exports, but this talk of the US being the world's savior makes me wanna hurl!

" ...this talk of the US being the world's savior makes me wanna hurl!"

As does your explicit support for the monstrous and unsustainable crime of the worldwide, central bankster-controlled and benefitting, fiat currency monetary system make many of us want to hurl as well.

Until honesty, transparency and sustainability are restored to our monetary system(s), no real financial reform is meaningful, or possible.

I am not suggesting that the US is or even was the world's savior but I do ask you to consider that in the years after the second world war, the Western world's financial situation was not unlike that of the Club Med countries after entering the euro: you had weaker economies who benefitted from interest rates probably lower than they should have been given the respective countries' fundamentals. After WWII, Europe benefitted from the economic and military "umbrella" that the US provided.

The same is true of Japan. Everybody won from that game. Things begam to fall apart here with the deficit spending of a war and domestic programs of the '60s (sound familiar) and it took the Volcker Fed to try to get us back on track. But I do think that saying that the US has had a free ride because we were the exchange currency is not only unfair, but also inaccurate.

Somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory, I remember a communist takeover attempt in Greece that the US may have helped avert; until the communists decided it was easier to do it through the ballot box.

My grandfather fought with the Americans in WWI. My father did his psychiatry residency in Chicago. The US was good to my family. The US Army paid my grandmother a pension after my grandfather passed away till her dying days. Believe me when I tell you that we owe a debt of gratitude to the United States of America.

But the US of those years is not the same United States now. Neither is Greece for that matter. The world has changed, and not always for the better.

I often think about what the older generation achieved and think how spoiled we are. This culture of entitlement where everyone is looking to scam the system has destroyed us. Those values that come straight from Wall Street are destroying the fabric of our society. It truly is a shame. Yes, let's drink to better days. Cheers.

Eurodollars plunged on Thursday creating a wave in the interest rate swaps market. The largest cash market in the world. These swaps are what most ETFs actually trade, not baskets of stocks. Is it a coincidence the majority of stocks NASDAQ froze were ETFs like FAZ? Stocks designed to profit off a market crash failed on Thursday.

80% of Americans support this. Why has it met this much resistance? Why are they trying to compromise it, for the other 20% behalf. This shows you that you have very little representation in D.C. . This is a golden opportunity when public sentiment is united, we the citizens will be to blame if we let this slip away.

For an explanation on the watering down of the Audit the Fed Amendment coming directly from Sen. Sanders on the Thom Hartmann Program today, please refer to my questioning of him beginning at 2:35. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66OWjuYeTXI

And another question is that if people want to terminate the FED thanks to an audit, what is it they think to cause the end of the FED? What has the FED so disturbing to hide that it could end it if revealed?